This site, created and managed by caregivers, directs patients to a practitioner near them who agrees to become their attending physician. Franceinfo met this small team of volunteers who value efficiency and human contact.
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The title of the website announces the color: “Seeking attending physician”. On a clearly visible red background, a telephone number is indicated, an email address and the advantages of the attending physician recalled: better follow-up and more reimbursements. It is a group of doctors from the professional territorial health community of Metz who is at the origin of this platform allowing patients to find the appropriate and above all available practitioner quickly. The Moselle is, like many French departments, faced with the phenomenon of medical deserts, as shown by a recent study of rural mayors.
“There is no miracle recipe, we try to put patients in touch with doctors who still accept to take on patients as treating doctors, summarizes Doctor Jean-Daniel Gradeler, at the head of this team based in the suburbs of Metz. We did a survey using the vaccination center where 80,000 vaccinations were performed. We gave a questionnaire to the patients asking them: ‘Do you have a doctor? Are you looking for a treating doctor? Dr. Gradeler and his colleagues then carried out a second survey of health professionals in the territory: “We sent 550 emails, 280 doctors opened the email and replied. And there are 41 who said: yes, I still accept to take patients from the attending physician.”
Then it’s Laura, the assistant, who takes matters into her own hands. She updates the list of patients looking for an attending physician. There are all profiles: “I have young people who are at university, people who come from nursing homes. My role is really to join the attending physician who takes care of new patients. I also try to be in a radius of less than fifteen minutes by car in the patient’s area.”
Once the name of an available doctor has been communicated, Laura, the assistant, calls the patient back to find out if everything has gone well. The opportunity, for example, to remind one of them that it is not necessary to wait to fall ill to contact a doctor. A first appointment can make it possible to declare a treating doctor to set up a course of care.
About forty patients have thus found a treating doctor thanks to this system. If this device works, consider Jean-Daniel Gradeler, it is because it is managed directly by doctors: “I think that changes things. They are not the same interlocutors. I think that I have a legitimacy that an administrative person at the level of a fund will not have [d’assurance maladie] or even the medical adviser at the fund level.” The Messina team is continuing its painstaking work in the conurbation in order to process the requests already received and to find other patients who do not yet have an attending physician.